Thursday, November 12, 2009

Now that we’ve reached one hundred posts, it’s time to start moving forward with this blog as a website. I feel like TATI is past the point where being tagged a blogspot blog doesn’t matter. TATI has quadrupled in average traffic over the past month-and-a-half. I feel like we’re on the verge of something special here. Now that this site has risen above complete triviality, I’m very interested in giving you all the best possible experience. I don’t think blogspot is capable of doing that any more.

I’ve been receiving reports that comments on this blog are quite flaky. This is a big problem. This place is about discussion more than it is about my pontifiactions. Without comments being surefire, I’m not satisfied.

I’d also like to do more with TATI than just posting blog entries. I want to put together some longer-form game design essays that don’t make sense as blog posts. I also would like to put information on games I’m working on in a central and more permanent place. Additionally, I write creatively and would like a good place to put up those writings. Rest assured: they would not mingle at all with the stuff you guys have come here to read.

At the moment we have a domain, but it forwards here. I’m not particularly happy seeing blogspot in the address bar. I feel like it cheapens the site.

We’re also not particularly happy with the analytics we get. I’ve been using both statcounter and quantcast and I feel like neither of them does enough for us. I don’t think this site is at a point where paying for analytics makes sense, but it’s important that I know what our audience is doing so I can get the blog better exposure.

I’m going to move this blog to either wordpress (custom installed on a shared hosting plan) or squarespace within the week. Squarespace seems to be the best option at this point.

If you don’t see any posts from me for the next 7 days, don’t worry. I haven’t given up on the site, I’m just moving it over to a better place. Once the move is complete, I’ll make a post here. You will be able to reach the new site through the domain we own, thatsaterribleidea.com. But you will have to switch over your blogroll links and your RSS feed, unfortunately.

You might consider posting some of the documents you've mentioned to Scribd and embedding them in your posts. This also gives you a traffic link back to Scribd, which is a growing online community. I'm just starting to try this myself.

I've also recently discovered how to embed Google docs which means I can embed a spreadsheet or presentation to a post and it'll automatically update after a while.

I personally love Google's products, don't mind the toolbar (in fact it's how I get to my dashboard) and am sticking with it to see what they come up with next.

That's good to know. I looked around the interface for that kind of feature and had trouble finding it earlier. Thanks.

AWizardInDallas:

I hadn't considered scribd. I guess I could do that as a way to get around blogspot's relative feature lack. That certainly doesn't beat actually having proper pages with documents on them, formatted properly and not subject to two different services' whims.

I'm a huge user of google's services. I have 90+ google documents, presentations, and spreadsheets and at least five gmail accounts. I use maps, reader, and I used to use calendar regularly. I'm not thinking of moving because I don't like google, but because blogspot isn't doing everything I want it to.

After thinking about the move for 20 hours I'm not so sure I want to do it anymore. If I set up the domain properly and get in contact with blogger support about the comments issue, I think I'll be happy enough with the service here to keep going.

I don't like blogger. It demeans the quality of your writing, in my mind. I use wordpress self-hosted, and am happy with it, but making a more content-oriented site (and a less blog-style) does take some tweaking. You can see on my site, for example, a category-navigation widget in the sidebar showing all topics, and my 'find posts by category' page is also customised.

Squarespace looks very promising though, I can see why you'd look at it. I imagine the features I just described about my own site would be much easier to achieve in squarespace.

Try TypePad.com from SixApart. It's made by the same people who do MoveableType (powers BoingBoing). You get a rich template language for fine-grain control of the site, they manage it all for you, and it's very cheap (you pay a small cost for the excellent support they give you).

Why we're here.

That's a Terrible Idea is a tag-team blog about designing better games. Though we focus on MMOs, we both are avid gamers that happily reach beyond the mainstream to find the games that suit us the best. We aim to offer insight and analysis on design decisions in existing games and constructive suggestions for the future.

Though we are both amateurs in game design, we spend many hours thinking about this stuff and want to create a place to cultivate useful discussion and analysis. We encourage experts and professionals as well as fellow amateurs to critique our work. Please help us improve the quality of the material here with your insight and knowledge.

We'd like to move past punditry towards a small, close community of gamers and game designers. Above all else, we want to facilitate the design of better games.